


The Nightmare of Jim Moriarty

by goingbadly



Category: Paprika (2006), Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Crossover, Dreams, Dreamsharing, Infectious psychosis, M/M, PTSD, Paprika/Sherlock Crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-25
Updated: 2014-02-25
Packaged: 2018-01-13 17:36:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1235197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goingbadly/pseuds/goingbadly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The DC Mini allows therapists to visit the dreams of their patients, and influence those dreams to aid recovery. However, a DC Mini has fallen into the hands of a dangerous terrorist, who is using it to spread his own psychotic nightmare to innocent sleepers. Sebastian Moran - soldier, hunter, killer - is sent in to track down the terrorist and stop him. Sebastian's dreams aren't the most stable to begin with: soon he's lost in a repetitive world, that he's not sure ever made sense to begin with...</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Nightmare of Jim Moriarty

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fusion/crossover with the 2006 movie "Paprika," and if you haven't seen Paprika, GO WATCH IT NOW. I'll wait. It's basically anime Inception, but smart, cool, and with not one but two (sort of) dynamic female leads. I'm told this fic makes sense even if you haven't seen it, but you SHOULD. It's great.
> 
> See the end notes for some minor things in the text that may want explaining.

“Yeah, but did you _see_ the guy?”

“Give me a break, Blackthorne, no one _sees_ Moriarty.” Sebastian lights a cigarette by snapping his fingers. Flame flares upwards, a bright spark like a lighthouse fire. It’ll be visible for miles. Around the solitary building they’re standing on there’s nothing but darkness, stretching uninterrupted for the horizon. The blackness swirls and billows, great semi-liquid clouds like cotton candy or fog, lapping at Sebastian’s feet. “As far as we know, the concept is just a product of the dream. There might not even be anyone alive with that name.”

“Jungian shit again…”

“Every fairy-tale needs a good old-fashioned villain.”

“Don’t fuckin quote him at me. Even if he’s not real, he gives me the goddamn creeps.”

*

Sebastian takes a seat in his CO’s office. The sun is setting, and through the narrow plastic blinds golden light filters in. It paints the hardwood floor the colour of honey, and Sebastian’s scotch glows like a sun. He swirls it in his hands, makes the rocks clink against the glass.

General Fred Roberts settles behind his desk with a sigh. Today he’s wearing an army uniform that went out of style in the 1850’s, festooned with medals. He’s grown a thick mustache and mutton-chops since Sebastian saw him yesterday. It would look ridiculous, but Fred’s eyes are just as narrow and penetrating as always. “Any luck out on the edges of it?”

Sebastian shakes his head. “Edges is a misnomer.” He takes a sip of scotch. It tastes like the porridge his mom used to make back home, thick and overpoweringly sweet. “It goes on forever. Just the dark.” The rocks in the bottom of his cup have melted. Sebastian sets the unappetizing mix of stone and oats back down on the table; there are limits to how polite he’s willing to be. “I think it’s alive.”

“And the… so-called terrorist? This… _Moriarty?_ ”

Sebastian snorts. “Whoever took the DC Mini was far too smart to come in here personally, if you ask me.”

“Someone had to start the whole thing in motion. They have to be _in_ the dream. Somewhere.” Fred turns his head. The sun glints between the blinds, over the hard line of his prominent nose, before flaring painfully bright. Sebastian squints. Fred takes one hand off his SA80 and uses it to pull his sunglasses down from his standard-issue MK6 helmet.

The blinding white sand on the dunes behind General Roberts makes Sebastian’s brow feel tight and painful. He sighs and rubs his face, getting up from the back of the one-thirteen he’d been sitting on.

The sky is pure blue, without a cloud in sight for miles. Sebastian adjusts the hang of the Barret M82 on his back. He carries it like knights carry swords in action movies, impractical for any real-world draw. Heat makes sweat stick between the gun and his spine, coating his shoulder-blades.

“You’re currently spending about twenty-four percent of your time somewhere in the middle east,” Roberts tells him. “Research with PTSD patients indicates a dangerous saturation point is anywhere above thirty-three percent.”

“Yeah, well,” Sebastian quips, looking out to the West where a cloud of oil-smoke is just starting to rise. “What are you going to do? Extract me?” Darkness smears up the horizon like a thick swath of ink, cutting clean through the blue sky.

*

They’ve lit the oilfields on fire. Sebastian walks through the chaos, untouched. Around him, indistinct people twist and writhe in the flames like sinners in the Pit. He thinks he sees his father. He’s not sure.

Under his feet the ground is white hot. He can hear the treads of his combat boots sizzling as they melt. Behind him, he leaves behind plastic footprints, a solitary trail extending further back than Sebastian can remember walking.

He can’t feel the heat any more than he can feel the spectral hands of the poor damned things pleading for help out of the fire. There’s still sweat on the back of his neck, but that’s from the desert. Sebastian rubs it idly away with one hand, pausing about a hundred feet out from the central pillar of smoke.

There’s confetti in the sky instead of ashes – brightly scraps of paper in peach and gold, as well as other stranger colours that Sebastian doesn’t have names for. He catches one. It’s colder than ice. One touch and the underside of his finger-nails turns frostbite blue.

Sebastian sticks his fingers in his mouth to warm them.

In front of him, in the column of smoke, he can just make out the corners of a building; vague shapes, like an artist has blocked it in but not started with details yet. He starts walking again, through the thickening storm of confetti. By the time the building looms over him, Sebastian is shivering and rubbing his arms. His desert combat gear wasn’t built to protect from absolute zero.

The Mandir at Angkor Wat sits in the center of the smoke. Its five ornately carved towers always reminded Sebastian of pine-cones; and now they’re burning, nothing but massive torches. He’s standing on the edge of the lily pond out front, rifle in hands. A tiger hops on the temple wall and pads along it, impeccable balance carrying it along the inch-wide track probably fifty feet above ground.

Sebastian nearly catches his breath. The beast is immense, and it moves like a ribbon of bright orange silk; muscles flowing, shoulders swaying in time with the flick of its black-tipped tail.

“Careful,” someone says at his elbow; a deep, pleased voice with a slight lilt like a songbird. “If he knows you’re here, he’ll come after you.”

“Don’t tell me how to hunt tigers,” Seb whispers back. The Barret M82 is in his hands. He raises it, bracing the butt on his shoulder.

In the scope, the tiger turns to him. It has the face of an Afghan child.

“Careful,” it mouths. Sebastian can’t hear anything but the rush of the oil fire.

His finger tightens on the trigger, slow and steady. When he pulls it, a magpie screams warning, and the dream fades to white.

*

Sebastian groans and rolls over on his cot.

Without opening his eyes, he fumbles around on the small camp table beside his bunk – grabbing a cigarette and matches. He lights one just by the familiarity of touch, takes a deep drag, and exhales slow.

When he opens his eyes he can see the ceiling of the library at his high school, like he’s lying on his back in the reading area. He takes another drag, blows a thick white cloud straight upwards, where it curls like incense. The ceiling is supported by thick tree-trunks and the sort of bare twisting vines you only see in the jungle.

Sebastian shuts his eyes again. Somewhere, in the real world, he’s been asleep for days. Hooked up to a massive, stationary version of the DC mini so the British government can monitor the dream he’s invading. Still, in the dream, he’s been continuously awake for – oh, hell, however long it’s been. Not like time makes a whole lot of sense in here.

He’s tired, is the point.

The DC mini might enable him to access other people’s dreams, but it keeps his brain conscious far longer than he’s entirely comfortable with.

Sebastian swings himself out of bed and tugs on his boots. He’s wearing the same combat fatigues he’d worn in the desert, minus body-armor and helmet. The ceiling and thick vines form a sort of clearing-pagoda; ten feet out from Sebastian’s bed, in a perfect circle, the jungle starts. Interspersed with trees and vegetation Sebastian recognizes from Laos – or maybe the ass-end of Vietnam – hospital beds spot the forest floor. Each has a white sheet pulled up over the head of the occupant. Each white sheet is marked by a single spot of bloody red.

Sebastian swings his rifle over his shoulder and starts out among them. Three steps in, the jungle path beneath his feet goes soft and spongy, like a mattress. By four steps the ground feels worryingly insubstantial.

One more step and he’s falling.

Sky scrapers blur past him, impossibly tall and impossibly detailed. Sebastian can see through each window as he passes; business men meeting. Lovers embracing. His mother, caught in the instant after his father backhands her, the long graceful arch of her back with the blow before she goes tumbling over. Sebastian falls at incredible speed, and watches. One of the buildings has a floor that’s the heart of a jungle, and as it blurs past Sebastian catches a glimpse of orange and black stripes like flames.

They grow, larger and larger, filling his vision.

Then Sebastian blinks, and he’s falling through the dark.

The endless, billowing dark. There’s a magpie flying beside him – keeping pace.

“Have you thought about what happens when you hit the ground?” it asks. “If you can’t wake up when you die…”

“I don’t plan that far ahead,” Sebastian replies.

“Neither did whoever chose _you_ for this mission,” the bird tells him mockingly. It darts about, more humming-bird than magpie – at his shoulder, over his chest, swooping down beneath him so he free-falls through the darkness towards it. Somehow, Sebastian can always see the magpie. Regardless of where it is. “Sending the mad-man into the mad-house and hoping the end result will be sane.”

“I was expendable,” Sebastian tells it.

“You sure _were.”_

The ground is starting to rush up towards them; Sebastian recognizes it as General Robert’s office. From above, Sebastian sees himself; he watches himself lean forward.

He can even see his own lips move as he asks General Roberts, “So what’s the problem?”

The General shakes his head, regretful, and straightens the sleeves of his suit. “To be honest we’re not sure if anyone can come out at all once they go in. Do you know anything about the DC Mini?”

Sebastian shrugs one shoulder. He’d frown, but he doesn’t want to give his concern and ignorance away. “They recommended it when I invalided out. Some sort of therapy device. Lets the shrinks into your dreams.”

“It powers itself using human brainwaves, and can be used for a hell of a lot more than therapy,” Roberts says sharply. “As far as we can tell, an as-yet-unidentified terrorist has stolen one and figured out a way to spread his own nightmare into _other people’s_ dreams. Anyone that’s connected to the DC Mini – anyone that’s _ever been_ connected– is being pulled into his psycho brain. And driven insane.”

The sun is setting, and through the narrow plastic blinds golden light filters in. It paints the hardwood floor the colour of honey, and Sebastian’s scotch glows like a sun. He swirls it in his hands, makes the rocks clink against the glass.

Sebastian shakes his head. “Infectious psychosis.” He takes a sip of scotch. It tastes peaty and thick. “Sounds like something in a sci-fi book.” The rocks in the bottom of his cup are starting to warm. Sebastian sets the glass back down on the table. “So what do I do?”

“Allow yourself to be infected. Track down the terrorist, and eliminate him. Or stop the dream.”

Sebastian snorts. “Go into a nightmare and kill the psycho controlling it.”

“Yes.” Fred turns his head from Sebastian. The sun glints between the blinds, over the hard line of his prominent nose, before flaring painfully bright. Sebastian squints. The soldier in front of him takes one hand off his SA80 and uses it to pull his sunglasses down from his standard-issue MK6 helmet.

He’s small, for a soldier. Slight. Pale. The blinding white sand on the dunes makes Sebastian’s brow feel tight and painful, even as he squints to make out the man’s face.

“I’m Jim,” the stranger says. He takes a seat on the back of the one-thirteen beside Sebastian, and offers an empty pack of smokes. Sebastian takes one, nodding thanks.

The sky is pure blue, without a cloud in sight for miles. Sebastian adjusts the hang of the broadsword on his back. Heat makes sweat stick between the scabbard and his spine, coating his shoulder-blades. Jim doesn’t appear to be armed.

“What are you doing here?” Jim asks.

“Hunting tigers,” Sebastian tells him. It seems like an appropriate response.

“Oh.” Jim is quiet for a long moment, looking out towards the horizon where a long column of smoke is just starting to rise. “Have you found many?”

*

They’ve lit the oilfields on fire. Sebastian starts forward through it, too used to the scene to be affected. The tortured souls around him might be real people, caught in the madness of Moriarty’s nightmare. Or they might just be pieces of his sub-conscious, ghosts of the past.

Under his feet the ground is so hot the sand has melted into glass. The treads of his combat boots stay behind him, a trail of plastic footprints that extends back past the horizon. Sebastian rubs the sweat from the back of his neck and stops walking about a hundred feet from the pillar of smoke.

He’s got a broad sword in his hand. The inscription on the blade reads _nemo me impune lacessit,_ but Sebastian’s not sure if he entirely agrees with that.

There’s confetti in the sky like ashes – brightly scraps of paper in peach and gold, blue-purple and cinnamon. One falls on the tip of his sword and fingers of frost stroke out over the steel.

In front of him, in the column of smoke, he can just barely glimpse the corners of a room; too lost in the smoke to make out exactly. He starts walking again, through the thickening storm of confetti. By the time oil fumes cut out light around him, Sebastian is shivering and rubbing his arms. His desert combat gear wasn’t built to protect from absolute zero.

Burning fog obscures his vision and when it clears, he’s standing in the central hall of Buckingham palace.

There’s a man sitting on the throne, sceptre in hand, crown askew on his head. Sebastian starts forward over the cushy red velvet carpet. The hall is long, and filled with people. They start to applaud as Sebastian approaches the dais. When he gets closer, Sebastian can tell easily who’s waiting for him. On the throne, Jim is smiling. Sebastian recognizes him from earlier, from the desert. He looks more at home in diamonds and fur than he’d looked in combat gear. There’s a magpie on his shoulder, dark feathers polished and gleaming.

Sebastian raises his sword, and sights down the familiar scope of his rifle at the man on the throne.

“Jim Moriarty,” the other man says, “ _Hi._ ”

“I’ve come to kill you,” Sebastian tells him.

“I thought you were hunting tigers.”

“I was.”

“Was?”

“Am, then.”

Moriarty grins in Sebastian’s crosshairs. The crowd applauds again. “You’re supposed to stop me spreading my madness through the DC mini. You’re the brave, brave knight of the fairy-tale, is that right?”

“Whatever you like,” Sebastian says, gun not wavering. “They don’t pay me to philosophise. Just to hunt tigers.”

Moriarty’s face falls serious at that. “Oh, Sebastian,” he sighs. “They don’t pay you at all.”

Sebastian’s finger tightens on the trigger. The walls stretch higher and higher. He feels the resistance of the metal beneath his grip, unwilling to bend. Moriarty, in the crosshairs, watches him sad and steady. Sebastian squeezes down.

The room pops like a soap bubble. The gilt and glitter of the court blinks away into tiny fragments of glitter, and Sebastian is standing in a five by seven concrete cell. He’s staring at his own grubby face in an equally dirty mirror, empty hand outstretched as if to fire a gun.

“You were expendable, darling,” whispers a magpie on his shoulder. “So they expended you. You’re out in the madness without a lifeline. Where is your body now, I wonder? How long have you been drowning in my mind?”

Sebastian has no answer for that.

≠≠≠≠≠≠≠

The DC Mini is hooked up to a monitor, and on the monitor Sebastian’s dreams play.

 _The sun is setting behind the narrow plastic blinds of the General’s office. The hardwood floor is the colour of honey, and the scotch Sebastian is swirling glows like a sun. Sebastian shakes his head. He takes a sip of scotch. They’ve lit the oil fields on fire._ _Don’t tell me how to hunt tigers…_

Jim takes the DC Mini off and sets it down in its case. He doesn’t bother looking at the monitor. He’s seen it all before. Besides – he’s still in there, really. At least a part of him; Sebastian’s been exposed to the DC Mini far too long to avoid being infected, poor thing. Jim doesn’t need to be directly connected to continue mucking about in Sebastian’s brain.

He gets up and pads over to the surgical table where he’s got Sebastian Moran restrained. It’s been a long process, worming his madness into Sebastian’s ear, and he’s gotten a teensy bit _fond_ of the soldier. Once he’d found out they were sending someone into the _dream_ to kill him, he’d known _instantly_ what to do. Jim is going to use the DC Mini to reprogram poor, poor Colonel Moran, and send him back to the government. With a really tastelessly big gun, and a death wish.

Jim brushes Seb’s hair back from his forehead, the fine strands soft and nearly white between Jim’s fingers. Sebastian frowns; not in response to being touched, he’s too far under for that now, but because something’s affected him in the dream.

Jim glances up at the monitors to check.

_The smoke clears away and Sebastian stands in the central hall of Buckingham palace with desert camo on his back and a sword in one hand. Around him the crowd is faceless, applauding. He looks up to the throne…_

One of the best things about the DC Mini is how Jim gets to see his own madness through the eyes of his victims. Sherlock Holmes dreamed him as a colossal tide of poison, an inexorable outpouring of venomous magma. Irene Adler thought he was a devouring clockwork machine; a hive full of ticking mechanical insects, inhuman and efficient.

_On the throne there is a small black bird, and the applause is getting louder –_

Jim hopes no one ever has a chance to tell Sebastian that the _horrors_ of his dreams aren’t the madness. The burning sinners, the corpses in the forest, the endless blackness… Jim feels a teensy bit _sorry_ for Seb, to be honest. The poor mad little soldier made those up on his _own_.

No, to Sebastian Jim’s nightmare is magpies and confetti that freezes whatever it touches. And, _interestingly_ enough(it would be worrisome if it wasn’t so fascinating) Sebastian also sees Jim as _what he actually looks like._ On its own, that’s entirely a good reason to be fond of him. So rare to find people who appreciate you, these days.

_Jim is waiting for Sebastian on the throne, sceptre in hand, crown askew on his head. Sebastian starts forward over the cushy red velvet carpet, sword gripped tight, chin up and gaze steady._

In the dream and the dream laboratory, Jim smiles identical smiles. He runs a finger down the line of Sebastian’s nose _,_ watching Sebastian frown in his sleep.

“Or maybe I should just keep you,” Jim says, and hears it echoed in the dream through the speakers behind him. “Poor, lost, _mad_ little boy. They gave you to me. All for my own. Why not?”

_In Buckingham palace it rains confetti, and Jim sits the throne like he’s always been there. Sebastian hefts the sword in his hand._

_The applause of the faceless crowd grows louder and louder, deafening. On the dais Jim’s crown looks like the DC mini._

_Sebastian falls heavily to his knees._

_Jim steps down off the dais, confetti swirling around him. Shining magpie wings sprout from his shoulders, arcing up for the ceiling. Confetti and black feathers swirl in the air around them. Jim seems to get bigger as he gets closer, blocking out light. Sebastian’s breath steams in the air between them. It’s below freezing, below zero, below absolute zero._

_Sebastian tries to hold on._

_But in the end he has always been falling._

**Author's Note:**

> "Jungian shit again" - Jungian archetypes are universal patterns or images that the collective unconscious of the human race shares - like, the Trickster, the Hero, the Devil. Sebastian (talking to himself in the dream) is thinking that Moriarty may just represent a "Nightmare/villain" archetype that arises in dreams rather than a person.
> 
> General Fred Roberts - Is Field Marshal Frederick Sleigh Roberts, the first Earl of Roberts. [Picture.](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/41/Earl_Roberts_of_Kandahar.jpg/220px-Earl_Roberts_of_Kandahar.jpg) Earl of Kandahar. Sebastian, if the character was a real Colonel in 1887, might have served under him. 
> 
> Angkor Wat - y'all should know, if you don't, it's in Cambodia - [Picture.](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/41/Angkor_Wat.jpg) \- and you should REALLY know there was a genocide in Cambodia. Personal headcanons for modern!Seb have him serving in Indo-China rather than India.
> 
> "seat on a one-thirteen" - one-thirteen is a slang term for armoured personal carrier - [Picture.](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/USAF_M113_APC_at_Camp_Bucca,_Iraq.jpg)
> 
> nemo me impune lacessit - No one can harm me unpunished, or no one challenges me with impunity. It's a motto of a few of the Scottish regiments of the British army.


End file.
